Past & Present

Both China and Russia dominate the headlines lately. Reflecting on the two nation’s current role, Chrystia Freeland’s article on the return of authoritarianism has gained a lot of warranted attention. Was the gloating by liberal democrats in 1991 a failure to prognosticate?

Although somber about his passing, I do get pleasure from noting a person such as Solzhenitsyn who clearly shaped history but was nonetheless not in command of armies nor economies. The New York Times did a thorough and enjoyable obituary from which I learned many things. There have also been some mostly awful commentaries by pundits, most of them mangling history to score some points in current political pissing matches. I am sure Alexandr would be stocially disgusted by it all.

I have used Solzhenitayn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch in my class on the world history of the twentieth century, and even this tough audience of freshmen non-majors seem to enjoy it and benefit from it.

The point I make about Solzhenitsyn in this class is that his impact and fate was another tell-tale sign that the Soviet regime was doomed. Nikita Khrushchev, although he had Ukraine’s blood on his hands and his smooch marks on Stalin’s rear-end, did sincerely wish to take the Soviet Union on a non-repressive path after Stalin. Khrushchev, when he denounced Stalin in the secret speech of 1956, did earnestly hope that its residents would find a satisfying life within Soviet socialism. Khrushchev was impressed by Solzhenitsyn’s literary skill and decided to allow the publication of One Day, signaling that ideas and art would no longer be bound and gagged. But this gesture, made in 1963, was empty. Khrushchev had already reverted to the easier street of thuggery in dealing with Hungary in 1956, and in conceding the need for the Berlin Wall in 1961.

When Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago shone harsh light in 1973 for the first time on the breadth and depth of the Soviet’s police-state tactics, the successors of Khrushchev arrested and exiled Solzhenitsyn. This crackdown meant that Khrushchev’s loosening of the control on words was not only an empty gesture, but also temporary. And the renewed oppression would prove correct the worrisome assumption that drove Khrushchev to an early, meek attempt at reform: that you can’t coerce a people into creating a successful social system.

I may be one of the last to see this, but I am posting it anyway. I share the misgivings of a lot of people about PowerPoint, or more precisely, about how ubiquitous it has become. It has its place. But PowerPoint is not always the best means to communicate, and it is a heck of a lot worse than a well written and well spoken speech in some cases.

Take for example, the best speech in history, the Gettysburg Address. 

Hilarious. 

The New York Times reporter Semoni Sengupta finds the promises of  India’s so-called Green Revolution era now emptied. At the same time,  the environmental harms endure to this day that were inflicted by these farm modernization programs of the 1960s in South Asia.  

The surge this year in food prices has brought some attention back to farming, which is normally willfully neglected by most of the people who eat. That greater attention is a good thing, even if food shortages are not. Good also is examples such as this article of looking backward at the history of agriculture of the 20th century, which deserves to be termed a “revolution” (for better and for worse) every bit as much as the agricultural revolution that was centered in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

 I have used this article  by Gregg Easterbrook in my classes on Twentieth Century World History as an introduction to the Green Revolution. It’s a compelling overview, and I agree that it is curious how unfamous is Norman Borlaug, even though the wheat plant he bred saved millions from starvation and earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 (I had the honor of meeting Dr. Borlaug and interviewing in Platteville, Wisconsin about 20 years ago).

Unfortunately, Easterbrook’s article doesn’t say enough about the social and environmental problems brought on by the Green Revolution; the Times article today clearly points out that some consequences have been unforeseen and regrettable.

It is a conservative who asks in his article about Rick Perlstein’s history book Nixonland: “Are you experiencing cognitive dissonance?”

The conservative is J. Patrick Coolican, and the article is posted on a popular conservative blog called Politico.com. I repeat “conservative” so much here as an ironic illustration that the likes of Coolican put too much emphasis on that.

To a pundit, that label is all important. Like the real one, the political pundit’s bible begins with “In the beginning was the Word”.  But in their creation story the genesis of a brain begins with either the word “conservative” or “liberal”. All else in their worldview unfolds from either the one label or the other.

 Coolican’s point — the article’s “hook”, as reporters call it — about Perlstein and the new book on President Richard Nixon (1969-74) is that the author and the book are liked by conservatives even though Perlstein is a liberal. And the headline for the review is “Historian Bridges Left-Right Divide”.

My own point is that I disagree with this review’s starting assumption: that it is remarkable that a history book about a conservative movement can be both written by a liberal and be worth reading by conservatives. 

In fact, it is sad and laughable that anyone would find that remarkable. It is a symptom in part of punditry’s harmful influence, but it is even more so a sign that this idea of ”a divide” is overdone.  As I said above, Coolican puts too much emphasis on the labels.

I’m still trying to get my hands on the book without buying it in hardback. (I’m not so poor or miserly that I refuse to buy any hardback history books, and I, unlike some historians who would never stoop to such a level —  do read journalistic, popular histories. But such histories are usually good for only one read, except if they cover what I teach and have the good anecdotes that transfer well to the classroom. But I don’t teach U.S. history per se.) But I gather the book is thinner on theory, historiography or archival work (despite what Coolican’s review says) than , say, works on Nixon by Stanley Kutler, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor whom I have met. And Perlstein has a blog and is out there as a public figure.

So I gather Nixonland is a book meant to be popular, meant to be tossed around in the talk among political types. Perlstein means to argue — based on the articles about it and not my reading of the book itself — that the roots of conservativism today that are found in the 1960s are illuminating but largely forgotten. That’s valuable work to make that point, and interesting to contrast with how visible is the role of the roots of today’s liberalism within the 1960s. To attack today’s liberals, the 1960s have been overblown into ready-to-use cliches of dirty hippies who spit on veterans or militant blacks in Oakland scowling and armed to the teeth.

I’m glad Perlstein’s book is out there, because it seems more serious and beneficial than the books that contain history from the well-heeled conservative pundit establishment (some have called it vast and a conspiracy). Books such as Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism come to mind, or one by Ann Coulter that tried to resurrect Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reputation.

Those two books are examples of things written by and for conservatives for the sake of conservatism, of which there are many more examples that do not even try to use history to make their “points”. And self-described liberals such as Michael Moore or Al Franken churn out the same genre from their foxhole on their side of the spectrum.

It’s from this ideological battleground that Coolican comes when he is seemingly surprised by Perlstein’s book on Nixon. How can it be that a conservative would find value in reading a book by a liberal?

In Coolican’s brain this fact produces cognitive dissonance. I pity that brain. 

With the 60-year anniversary of the creation of Israel upon us, I expect lots of attention on this messy history. And that’s good. I also predict zealots on both sides will mangle the facts, and strangle the parts that stain their side.  

Newly opened documents flesh out the problems that Britain faced trying to manage Palestine just after World War II. Yes, the British’s interest in ruling the former Ottoman territory after World War I flowed in part from the oil of the Mideast. There were also Brits who led them into the snake pit with earnest concern for both Arabs (T.E. Lawrence) and Jews (Alfred Balfour). But it is one of those episodes that from hindsight looks so obviously to have been a predictable quagmire. What were they thinking?

Zionists, especially, were so understandably militant due to the  holocaust that no patience was possible toward British aims to balance the population in Palestine between Arabs and Jews. I remember reading Golda Meir’s autobiography and her conviction at the time that no one in the world cared for these European refugees except the yishuv of Palestine.

The new documents show Britain officials agonizing as much about their own image as about the plight of the victimized Jews of Europe when a renegade ship called the Exodus, overloaded with those European Jews, tried to break through with this cargo of huddled masses the British embargo on any additional immigrants to Palestine.

The Exodus’ ordeal focused world attention on the British blockade of Palestine and the plight of Jews fleeing Europe after World War II.

The documents show that diplomats and military officers knew that sending Jews back to Germany and putting them in camps so soon after the Holocaust would set off protests.

Although the British worried about effects of these acts on worldwide p.r., I wonder instead what role these episodes played in propelling militant zionists such as the Irgun who would embrace terrorist tactics and kill Brits and Arabs in Palestine until the British left on May 14, 1948.

Does the Torah, like the Old Testament, also contain that passage about sowing the wind? 

The New York Times features a slide show of the exhibitions concerning the Pre-Columbian and Early Colonial past of Latin America, one at the Field Museum in Chicago and the other at the Library of Congress in Washington.

If you want to see a historian of medievel Europe come unglued, all you have to do is refer to the centuries from around 400 to 1100 a.c.e. with the old-fashioned term ”Dark Ages”. Their work has beaten back the impression that nothing of importance was happening.

 On the other hand, historians of Islam are also chipping away at another misperception from old-fashioned versions of history. That is the impression that “The West” arose seemingly spontaneously, and fulfilled a would-be destiny to dominate the world due mainly to its inherent and admirable qualities. Medievel histories of the Islamic world are showing convincingly that Europe, as it gained more economic vitality and more intellectual RPMs, was doing so by feeding off the already dynamic culture and economy of Islamic peoples to the south and east.

One example of this work is from Janet L. Abu-Lughod. Over the airwaves last night, we also had NYU historian David Levering Lewis, talking about his book “God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215.” (Between you and me, Dr. Lewis talked a little bit like a historian, and is not the second coming of Eric Severaid).

Both Abu-Lighod and Lewis make the point that if Medievel Europe was not exactly the dark ages, it was at least dimmer than the califate.

Some Guy had a birthday today

It’s a song about history, and it transports you back to the mid-80s.